Archive

Here we are with the second part of the timeline of May (first part here).

Summer is coming here, and looks like attackers prefer to spend more time in the beach rather than in front of their keyboards. In fact the number of reported attack is confirming its decreasing trend, at least for this part of the year.

Nonetheless, the second part of may has brought some noticeable events, such as the attack to Ebay (potentially 145 million accounts compromised), the attack against the Avast! Forum (400,000 records compromised) and the Arkansas State University (“only” 50,000 records). Other noticeable (and funny) event includes the hack of a San Francisco road sign by a prankster announcing the attack by Godzilla!

Cyber Spies were indeed pretty active in this period. Chronicles report of the Operation Clandestine Fox, a cyber attack against several industries in Australia, an undisclosed utility attacked in the US, a three year social network poisoning campaign sponsored by Iran and, last but not least, the alleged attack against the $12.7 million supercomputer in New Zealand from Chinese attackers.

Instead the operations from Law Enforcement Agencies against Hacktivists seem to be effective, the number of attacks motivated by hacktivism is dramatically reducing.

As usual, if you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

And here we are with the second part of the Cyber Attacks Timeline for May (first part here).

The second half of the month has shown an unusual activity with several high-profile breaches motivated by Cyber-Crime or Hacktivism, but also with the disclosure of massive Cyber-Espionage operations.

The unwelcome prize for the “Breach of the Month” is for Yahoo! Japan, that suffered the possible compromising of 22 million users (but in general this was an hard month for the Far East considering that also Groupon Taiwan suffered an illegitimate attempt to access the data of its 4.1 million of customers).

On the cyber-espionage front, the leading role is for the Chinese cyber army, accused of compromising the secret plans of advanced weapons systems from the U.S. and the secret plans for the new headquarter of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

On the Hacktivism front, this month has been particularly troubled for the South African Police, whose web site has been hacked with the compromising of 16,000 individuals, including 15,700 whistle-bowlers.

Other noticeable events include the unauthorized access against the well known open source CMS Drupal (causing the reset of 1 million of passwords), the trail of hijacked Twitter accounts by the Syrian Electronic Army and also an unprecedented wave of attacks against targets belonging to Automotive.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

The first half of March is gone, and here it is the Timeline of the main Cyber Attacks for this period, a timeline which shows, once again, a month characterized by Hacktivism, and in particular by cyber attacks carried on in retaliation for the arrests of the LulzSec members, among which, particularly meaningful, is the one perpetrated against a Security Firm: Panda Security.

As far as hacktivism is concerned, March has also seen the rise of a new hacking collective called The Consortium, who hacked Digital Playground, an adult porn site, acquiring 72,000 user accounts.

Other remarkable events include the attacks to several Vatican Websites, the theft of Michael Jackson’s catalogue from Sony, and the Cyber attack to British Pregnancy Advisory Service which allowed the alleged attacker, to illegally obtain 10,000 records.

Last but not least, James Stavridis, the NATO Admiral, has fallen indirect victim of a Social Poisoning Cyber Attack allegedly perpetrated by chinese hackers, as also BBC has fallen victim of a sophisticated Cyber Attacks from Iran.

The references are after the jump and, as always, the timeline does not include the events related to Middle East Cyberwar, object of a dedicated timeline.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) and follow @pausparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

This month I am a little late for the December Cyber Attacks Timeline. In the meantime, I decided to collect on a single table the main Cyber Attacks for this unforgettable year.

In this post I cover the first half (more or less), ranging from January to July 2011. This period has seen the infamous RSA Breach, the huge Sony and Epsilon breaches, the rise and fall of the LulzSec Group and the beginning of the hot summer of Anonymous agsainst the Law Enforcement Agencies and Cyber Contractors. Korea was also affected by a huge breach. The total cost of all the breaches occurred inthis period (computed with Ponemon Institute’s estimates according to which the cost of a single record is around 214$) is more than 25 billion USD.

This awful infosec July is over, and finally we can sum up the Cyber Attacks reported during this month. I collected all the available information and inserted it inside the following chart. Where possible (that is enough information available) I tried to estimate the cost of the attacks using the indications from the Ponemon’s insitute according to which the average cost of a Data Breach is US $214 for each compromised record. The total sum (for the known attacks) is around $7.6 billion, mainly due to the “National Data Breach” of the South Korean Social Network Cyworld.

Approximately 16 attacks were directly or indirectly related to Antisec or Anonymous, they promised an hot summer and unfortunately are keeping their word…

A couple of hours ago Anonymous re-leaked the info of 2,500 Monsanto employees enriched with further data. The reasons are explained in the following statement:

We previously leaked 2551 emails and names of MonsantoCo employees and associates for the whole internets to see.
Immediately following this, attacks were made attempting to access/change the password on the OpMonsanto Twitter account as well many failed login attempts on 2 corresponding email accounts.
The paypal account used to finance the operation was reported and all assets frozen. Somebody, most certainly, is mad at us :(

We didn’t appreciate that very much, so we updated the leaked database to include
the previously redacted city/state/country and phone numbers.

Operations remain unaffected, this is just the beginning.

In response to some attempts to hack the #OpMonsanto Twitter account, Anonymous decided to disclose further information about the leaked records (Cities and Phone Numbers). The last phrase of the statement sounds particularly threatening: This is just the beginning… And it is further confirmed by a gloomy tweet. A warning for Exxon (#OpExxon) as well, the next alleged target?

are an aftermath of the WikiLeaks affair and concern the alleged strategy used by Monsanto to push GMO. Few days ago Anonymous warned Monsanto to expect something “more serious than a DDOS” after the company filed lawsuits against organic farmers for labeling their product as not containing growth hormones. At the end something more serious than a DDOS happened…

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In this blog I express my personal opinion, which does not necessarily reflects the opinion of my organization, about events and news or interest, concerning information security, winking to mobile world and, why not, to some curious personal event.

Every information is reported with its source.

Anyone intending to use the information contained in my posts is free to do so, provided my blog is mentioned in your article.